The New Broom

You’re the
newly appointed editor of an important
literary magazine, eager to remake it in your own aesthetic. The problem is
that the magazine has a substantial backlog of work accepted by its previous
editors, including a number of poems that you either don’t like or don’t see as
reflecting the magazine’s new identity. What do you do?

If you’re Lorin Stein, the
new editor of the Paris Review, you renege
on the magazine’s previous commitments to publish much of the backlog as a way
of giving your new poetry editor, Robyn Creswell, a fresh start. “In order to
give Robyn the scope to define his own section, I regret to say, we will not be
able to publish everything accepted by [the previous editors],” he wrote in a
form e-mail sent to the affected poets in July. “We have not found a place for
your poems, though we see much to admire in them and gave them the most serious
consideration.”

After a chorus of howls in the blogosphere, including the
creation of a Facebook page calling for a boycott of the Paris Review (since
withdrawn), Stein issued an apology, offering to pay the normal authors fees
and publish the poems on the magazine’s Web site. “I noticed that it hurt
people’s feelings, and I thought they were right,” he says now. “As soon as it
was pointed out to me that it was a crummy thing to do, I agreed that it was,
and I’m sorry to have been so ham-handed.”

Still, Stein stands by his decision. “I feel a duty as a new
editor to give our staff editorial control,” he says. “Different editors have
different tastes, and I want us to be able to ballyhoo every poem in the
magazine the same way we’d ballyhoo every piece of fiction and nonfiction. I
certainly didn’t enjoy turning stuff down. But I felt a strong editorial compulsion
to do it as we relaunched the magazine.”

The decision and its
fallout, exhaustively reported by Daniel Nester on his blog, We Who Are About
to Die, were unusual for a variety of reasons, not least their relative rarity.
While screenplays routinely get lost in the Hollywood purgatory known as “development
hell” and novels sometimes get caught in the spinning of the revolving doors
that connect New York City publishing houses, the acceptance of a
poem—generally unmoored from commercial considerations—is widely viewed as
all but sacrosanct, even when editors inherit manuscripts they wouldn’t have
chosen themselves.

At the New Yorker, for example, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Paul
Muldoon found himself in 2007 with a six-month backlog of poems accepted by his
predecessor as poetry editor, Alice Quinn, and the magazine’s editor, David
Remnick. “I didn’t feel the need to have a fresh start, however, and I
certainly didn’t drop any that had been accepted,” Muldoon wrote in a recent
e-mail exchange. “It would have been ill-mannered at best, and ill-advised at
worst, to drop poems. There were a couple I thought were borderline but even
those I held on to. I abhor the idea of the new broom. Most new brooms are
unbearably self-regarding. The bottom line here, I suppose, is that the poem is
more important than either the person who wrote it or the person who rewrote
it.”

Something similar happened
in 2009 at the Iowa Review, where
Russell Scott Valentino took over as editor from David Hamilton, who had served
for thirty-two years. Valentino inherited nearly two issues’ worth of poems,
short stories, and nonfiction from Hamilton, some of it “not exactly my
aesthetic,” Valentino says. “But I looked at it as an opportunity, since it
gave me time to spend that first semester learning about the magazine, working
on the redesign, and having my first reading period.” The journal could have
tried to “wiggle out” of its commitments to writers, he adds, but that was
never considered. “That’s just not the way we’ve done business in the past, and
that’s not the kind of magazine that I want to run. We spend a lot of time
cultivating new writers and putting them next to experienced writers. It would
have been devastating for our constituency—a lot of whom are new writers
looking for their first break—to act like that. That kind of willfulness would
have been unfair on our part, and also not very smart, given our following.”

Jeanne Leiby, who took over
editorship of the Southern Review from Bret
Lott in 2007, inherited no accepted work. But if she had found herself with a
backlog, she says, she would have honored it for a variety of reasons, not
least of which is the fact that many poets are also academics whose career
advancement depends in large part on their publication history. “I can see the
dilemma of the Paris Review, but I also
think that as editors, we work in service of writers,” Leiby says. “There are
people behind those poems, and they have lives. If something like this happens
at a smaller magazine, maybe it doesn’t have such a big impact, but publication
in the Paris
Review? That’s a career maker for
some people. That’s tenure, and if the acceptance is out there on a bio and
then all of a sudden it’s not true, that could be very detrimental to their
career.”

But Christian Wiman, editor
of Poetry magazine, sees Leiby’s view as “professionalizing
the process a little too much,” and supports Stein’s decision (if not the way
it was initially communicated). “A new editor needs to make a statement,” says
Wiman, who recalls declining to publish about five poems previously accepted by
Joseph Parisi, his predecessor at Poetry, in
2003. “You can’t just publish everything that’s flying around if it doesn’t contribute
to the statement you’re trying to make.”

The recent controversy at the Paris
Review—“the Purge,” as it became known on the Web—is reminiscent
of an earlier changing of the editorial guard in 2005, when a large number of
poems accepted by Richard Howard, then the poetry editor, were refused by the
magazine’s new editors. Ironically, one of those poems was by Creswell, which
lends his current status as the magazine’s poetry editor a karmic
inevitability.

“No one even got in touch
with him,” says Stein, who has known Creswell for years. “I myself had written
freelance magazine pieces that had been killed, so when Robyn’s poem wasn’t
used, neither of us thought that much of it. We laughed it off.”

No one’s laughing now.

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The acceptance of a poem—generally unmoored from commercial considerations—is widely viewed as all but sacrosanct, even when editors inherit manuscripts they wouldn’t have chosen themselves.”